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The electronic cry: Voice and gender in electroacoustic music
Bosma, H.M.
Publication date 2013
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Citation for published version (APA): Bosma, H. M. (2013). The electronic cry: Voice and gender in electroacoustic music.
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Download date:23 Sep 2021 VII
‘THE DEATH OF THE SINGER’: 1 AUTHORSHIP AND FEMALE VOICES IN ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC
In electroacoustic music, women are mainly present as voice or as vocalist, while composers are mostly male, as shown in Chapter II. In the previous chapters, my focus was mainly on the gender of the voices or vocalists. I mostly put (the gender of) the composer/author between parentheses when analysing the compositions. In this chapter, I will first theoretically explore the issue of authorship in relation to singing voices. In the second part, several kinds of relationships between author/composer and vocalist/voice in some electroacoustic compositions are discussed. The third part focuses on ‘the death of the singer’ (the counterpart of ‘the death of the author’): the (re)interpretation and (re-)use of recorded voices as explicitly practised in some ‘plunderphonic’ compositions. The next chapter will focus on female authors and the notion of écriture féminine.
1 Parts of this chapter were published in earlier versions as Bosma (1996a, 1998b, 2000).
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164 VII.1.1 The ‘Death’ of the Author
Feminist musicology is often focused on female composers and their work and lives, with for example biographies, anthologies or editions of scores. An important problem for feminist musicologists is the seeming lack of female composers. After a quest for un- known, forgotten or neglected female composers, it became apparent that there are more female composers than one can find in the traditional histories of music; but still, there are more male than female composers. The discovery and making visible of female composers is not only an empirical-historical activity (finding out how things ‘really’ are/were), but has also a symbolic function: it produces representations and role models of female composers and changes the stereotypical image of the Composer as Male. Likewise, women’s studies into computer and electroacoustic music can focus on women composers. For example, Mary Simoni (1995) asks: why are there so few women composers, and what can we do about this? This corresponds with the approach of liberal feminism, in which equality between men and women is central. Andra McCartney (1995a, 1995b, 1995c, 1996, 1997, 2000b) and Elisabeth Hinkle-Turner (2006) focus on (respectively, Canadian and American) female composers of electroacoustic music, and study their work, experiences, practices, ideas and lives. In these studies of women composers there are aspects related to ‘equality’ (making more women composers visible in this male-dominated field) and to ‘difference’ (dealing with specific practices of women).2 However, my approach here is to question the notion of the composer/author and its implicit gendering. How important is the composer (whether male or female)? Inspired by Roland Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ (Barthes 1977 [1968]), some feminist musicologists became interested in the perspective of the (female) listener and in unconventional interpretations of canonical compositions (Dame 1994). Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ greatly influenced the thinking about the relation between text, writer and reader.3 The ‘Death of the Author’ is not only important for literary studies; later, it also
2 See Chapter I.1 for an account of the different approaches and phases in women’s/gender studies.
3 The status of the author has been challenged in many fields, e.g. art and music (Marcel Duchamp, John Cage).
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165 influenced ideas and debates about the status of the author in film (see for example Sil- verman 1988) and in music. Barthes’ ‘murder’ of the author is a reaction to its supposed autonomous autho- rity. When the author is considered as the master and the origin of his text, a text is interpreted according to the intentions of the author and also often in relation to the life of the author. This restricts the interpretations of readers. Barthes proposes that the text is ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’, instead of having a single, ‘”theological” meaning’ as ‘the “message” of the Author-God’ (Barthes 1977: 146). Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ contributed to the development of approaches in which the text is conceived from the perspective of the reader. ‘[T]he birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’ (Barthes 1977: 148).4 The ‘death’ of the traditional male Author opens up possibilities of finding female or feminine voices in canonical works and of bringing the standpoint of female readers and listeners to the fore. Inspired by reader-response criticism of literary studies, Citron (1993) and Dame (1994) developed the listener-response theory for musicology. Dame conceives the listener as formed by social-political, ideological and unconscious factors as well as by musical conventions (Dame 1994: 55). Dame developed her listener-response theory to ‘powerfully introduce the female listener in the process of musical signification’ (Dame 1994: 56).5 The focus on canonical compositions enlarges the domain of feminist musicology enormously. Canonical compositions form our musical experience, indeed define the practice, concept and phenomenon of music to a very large extent. Bringing new listening and reception practices to the fore is considered a political act.
4 The main part of Barthes’ essay deals with modern literature and its writer (scriptor instead of Author); he discusses the relationship to their texts of such writers as Mallarmé, Valéry, and Proust. Barthes’ essay can be interpreted as a manifesto against a representational, naturalistic view of literature (see Burke 1998). The dispersion of writing is focused in the reader, hence the shift of author to reader: ‘Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.’ (1977: 148) However, Barthes’ reader is ‘without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted’. Thus, Barthes’ reader is more an abstract instance than a specific person with a specific reading experience.
5 Originally in Dutch; translation by Hannah Bosma.
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166 However, others still see the author as a very important figure.6 Some propose ‘the return of the author’.7 With regard to contemporary author's rights, the author- function is essential. And why eliminate the author just when female authors arise?
[F]rom a practical standpoint it is not easy to disrupt entrenched belief systems without gradual modification. For women in particular there are [...] reasons to resist the elimination of the author. It could close off an important source of cultural authority, and just at the time when women are beginning to make inroads into historical prominence. As Nancy Miller and others have noted, men have long enjoyed authorial prestige and thus it might be easy for Barthes and other men to call for the elimination of the author. [...] The elimination of the author would prematurely preclude recognition of female achievement, and the net result could be further suppression of women’s artistic contributions. (Citron 1993: 118)
Feminist listeners' response may consist of new interpretations of old canonical compositions by male authors. But for contemporary music, canon formation is fully in process.8 When writing about recent compositions, one participates in the canon for- mation. The composers about whose compositions one writes are alive. The author is not only a function or a myth, but also a human person to whom one may feel moral, ethical or personal considerations. One may, accidentally or on purpose, meet the composer. Composers give interviews, lectures and workshops, and they themselves often write about their work or about the work of others. Is it perhaps better to keep out of the way of the composer when attending a concert for example? After ‘the Death of the Author’, has an interview with a composer become worthless? And her/his texts? By denying the author, one would deny oneself a potentially interesting source of information. Some argue for ‘de-centring the author’ instead of eliminating the author, leaving open new
6 To a large extent, the author never ‘died’. In musicology, music criticism and other realms of musical culture, many continued adhering to the authority of the author. In 2011, Keith Negus could still state:
Within the broad fields of musicology and music criticism, the author remains a central figure both as creative originator and authority. Whether a critic is concerned with the canonical greats of Western art music or an emerging canon of popular musicians, or whether a scholar’s focus is critical, formally analytical, or biographical, the repertory is located within a clear framework of assumptions about the individual authorial self. (Negus 2011: 607)
7 For example Seán Burke (1992, 1998), The Death and Return of the Author, and Chartier (1994), ‘Figures of the Author’.
8 This does not mean that the canon of older music is fixed for once and for all.
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167 possibilities for considering the relation between work and author.9 I propose treating the composer’s other texts, utterances and performances as con-texts, which can be analysed as texts and can (but do not have to) be related to compositions or performances in many different ways: such texts can be treated as supplement or comment, or compared or contrasted with the composition. I do not consider a composer’s explanations as telling the only truth about the composition, but as a kind of discourse that is influential, and interesting to analyse and criticize.10 An author is a cluster of links, referring to other texts, cultural objects and practices. To pay attention to authors and others who contributed to the work, while also developing one's own interpretation as listener, reader, critic and/or researcher, will not limit but enhance the ‘sign wealth’.11 One way of focusing on the gender of the author without essentializing, is to look for ‘the author inside the text’. In theorising ways of finding a female authorial subject in films by female directors, Kaja Silverman takes Barthes ‘Death of the Author’ as a point of departure. She finds that Barthes in fact ‘kills’ the Male Author and his paternity, that is, the author as master of the discourse. At the same time, Silverman finds the authorial figure arising in Barthes’ work in other guises. Silverman agrees with Barthes that ‘the author who should be the chief object of current theoretical concern is the one who occupies the interior of the text’, and she refers to this figure as ‘the author “inside” the text’, that is, the author as constructed by a text and its reader, the author as a function of the text. But Silverman is less prepared than Barthes to ‘bracket the biographical author altogether’, and instead pays attention to the relationship of the author ‘inside’ the text to the author ‘outside’ the text (Silverman 1988: 193). The female author-inside-the- composition in relation to the author-outside-the-composition (but inside-other-texts) is
9 Burke (1998) argues that Roland Barthes, especially in his texts after ‘The Death of the Author’, does not eliminate but de-centres the author, offering new ways of considering the relationship text – author and work – life.
10 Note the difference of my approach to the position of Uri Sala (2008), who after a critical examination of the notion of the death of the author, asks ‘What about living, active composers one has relatively unimpaired access to? Whose expressed intentions and compositional methods one has the chance to investigate through first-hand dialogue?’ (Sala 2008: 197). Sala then proceeds by uncritically outlining some aspects of the compositional method of Hèctor Parra, as described in a thesis of the composer. In my view, Sala returns to (or perhaps never departed from) an uncritical following of the composer, by explaining and summarising what the composer wrote elsewhere on his composition techniques, without adding a different point of view and without taking a critical distance.
11 The term ‘sign wealth’ comes from Geller 1994 (a, b) in the context of legal copyright. My use here is a free interpretation of this term, inspired by but not strictly adhering to Geller.
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168 also my concern here in relation to electro-vocal compositions. As Silverman shows, the author-in-a-text or the author-in-a-film can be found in many guises. My main concern here will be with the (real) voice of the female author in a composition. And I will also make another move: considering female voices and female vocalists as authors. As Barthes (1968), Foucault (1969), Silverman (1988), Citron (1993) and others show, the notion of the author is complex. Among other things an author is an authority, a person, a legal subject, a myth, a way to classify works, a function of an art work; the author is the one who is responsible for the ultimate form and organisation of a work; the author is the original owner of the author’s rights; the author is also an object of desire or a fantasy of the reader, viewer or listener; the author is a cluster of links, referring to other works, texts, practices and institutional functions, in the past, present and future; the author is also a reference to a living person, interacting with others; the author is an entrepreneur, promoting his/her work; the author is one of the main actors in the network of a composition; and so on... I am not interested in a dogmatic theoretical elimination of the author. I use the notion of the author as a disputed category: not as a fixed, ‘divine’ ‘master’ who possesses the truth about his/her artworks (a truth which experts-critics- musicologists ought to be able to discern), but as a construction shaped or implied by texts, practices and artworks, and as one (important) voice among many to analyse critically. Instead of Barthes’ declaration of the ‘death of the author’, I prefer Foucault’s (1977 [1969]) question: ‘what is an author?’ Authorship is an interesting theme in many musical and other art works. The medium of electroacoustic music, and especially the work of female composers and vocalists in electro-vocal music, complicates the notion of authorship in a special way.
VII.1.2 Composer vs. performer: What is an Author?
The shift in focus in feminist musicology from the composer to the listener bears some resemblance to a development in gender and technology studies where attention is paid to workers and users as producers of technological practices, instead of exclusively focusing on the, mostly male, inventors. In doing so, more female participants and female influences can be perceived.
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169
To fully comprehend women’s contributions to technological development, [...] a more radical approach may be necessary [than only looking for female inventors]. For a start, the traditional conception of technology too readily defines technology in terms of male activities. (Wajcman 1991: 16–17)
For one thing, we have to find the women. Social studies of technology have, in the main, been concerned with the initiatory moment - inventors, innovation. [...] Such is the sexual division of labour that few if any women are to be found among these actors. [...] Women are invisible in the mainstream technology studies partly because of their actual absence from the network as there defined. There is a relatively simple corrective: extend the scope of the technology world. [...]We had only to shift our gaze beyond the walls of the design office and many women came into view as actors. (Cockburn & Omrod 1993: 9).
Gender and technology studies not only shifts its attention from the inventor towards co- producers and users; it also assigns importance to ‘women’s sphere’ technologies, for example the baby bottle or household technology, that were often ignored or not consi- dered as technology. ‘Certain technologies are given higher status than others[; t]he hierarchy so created is a gender hierarchy’ (Cockburn & Omrod 1993: 1). Likewise, by questioning the importance of the composer and by focusing on and revaluing women’s practices, there will appear a greater and more important place for women in music.12 There is more than one figure who contributes to the music: not only the composer, but also text writers, vocalists, musicians, directors, audience, technicians, producers, publishers, music teachers, critics, instrument makers, and so forth. Somewhat like film, and far more than literature, music is often a co-production.13 A film, a musical perfor-
12 Studies on women in music often not only pay attention to female composers, but also to female performers, teachers, patrons and other functions in professional musical life, as well as to private music making, as their titles already indicate. See for example Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150 – 1950 (Jane Bowers & Judith Tick, eds., 1986); Von der Spielfrau zur Performance- Künstlerin: Auf der Suche nach einer Musikgeschichte der Frauen (Freia Hoffman & Eva Rieger, eds., 1992) and Women in American Musical Theatre: Essays on Composers, Lyricists, Librettists, Arrangers, Choreographers, Designers, Directors, Producers and Performance Artists (Bud Coleman & Judith Sebesta, eds., 2008). Or, as Mary Ann Smart states in her introduction to Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera: ‘As several of the articles demonstrate, scholars have begun – partly out of a desire to add women’s voices to the history of male-authored opera – to pay attention to the creative contributions of singers to the operatic text, as well as to the perspectives of audience members and female patrons.’ (Smart 2000: 16). More recent studies that challenge the status of the composer are for example: Kimberley Francis’ article on the influence of Nadia Boulanger on the work of Igor Stravinsky (2010. A Dialogue Begins: Nadia Boulanger, Igor Stravinsky, and the Symphonie de psaumes. Women and Music: A Journal on Gender and Culture 14: 22–44); Changing the Score: Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance by Hilary Poriss, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009 (with a review by Melina Esse in Journal of the American Musicological Society 64: 3, 2011).
13 This is more obvious in pop/rock music than in classical music, but both are produced by a network of different agents, albeit in a different way. In classical music, the roles of the composer and the
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170 mance or an electro-vocal composition consists not only of the creative work of the acknowledged author, but also of the creative work of other persons or agents.14 Issues of authorship not only relate to ‘who did what’ (gender structure, sexual division of labour, gender pattern of location), but also to who is (re)presented as an author, and in which way (gender symbolism).15 It can be useful to read credits not as a neutral rendering of the various contributions of the musicians, but as a text that offers a gender configuration or even a role model. Who is represented in the credits, in which way, and how does that relate to the music? My discussion in Chapter V of the credits concerning Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) is an example of such an approach. The material gender structure and the related representational gender symbolism recursively influence each other (Cockburn & Omrod 1993: 7). When many male composers and female performer are the most prominent. Nicholas Cook (1995–1996) considers those who directly influence the musical production as the producing agents – composers, performers, sponsors and publishers. However, musical reception (critics, audience) and music eduction (teachers, conservatories) also influence the development of musical culture, and thus indirectly influence the production of particular performances.
[Rock, l]ike most popular music, [...] involves collaboration and negotiation between songwriters, composers, band members or solo stars, producers, engineers, and record company personnel; the result is, to use Lisa Lewis’s term, a highly segmented process of creation. [...] Such segmentation is equally a feature of the art music tradition. The repertory as we know it today is the result of collaboration and negotiation between composers, performers, patrons and other sponsors, impresarios, editors and publishers. To be sure, the production process in classical music is less collective than that of popular music; it is easier to distinguish the different roles, if only because they are largely sequential (whereas in popular music production they are largely simultaneous). And whereas authorship in popular music is bewilderingly fragmented, with almost as many patterns of collaboration as there are songs, classical music is dominated by one massively important variety of segmentation: the division of labour between composer and performer. (Cook 1995–1996: 32).
14 Silverman in her quest for female authorial subjectivity considers one (implied) author per film: the director (this is in line with the auteur theory in film studies, which acknowledges the collaborative production of film but considers the director as the author). She recognizes the cinematic apparatus as an important productive force, but this is an abstract, general term for a collection of people, practices and technologies that produce a film. She does not consider for example the (implied) creative work of a specific (female or male) actor. With ‘implied’ I refer to the notion of the implied author, i.e. the author as constructed by the reader/listener/viewer of the text/composition/film. For a critical overview of auteurism in film studies, see Caughie (1981). Caughie indicates the masculinity of the figure of the author as follows: ‘where I refer to actual people (spectators, critics, or directors) I use the “he/she” form; where I refer to a more notional “figure of the author” I use “he”. This is, of course, not entirely satisfactory; but to adopt the “he/she” form throughout seems to run the risk of masking, with a linguistic equality, an institutional situation that is historically and notoriously unequal.” (Caughie 1981: 5). For a critical account of the centrality of the director as (implied) author in film studies and a plea for considering collaborative authorship based on empirical analyses of film production, see Sellors (2010).
15 See for the concepts of gender structure, gender pattern of location and gender symbolism Cockburn & Omrod (1993: 6-7). Cockburn & Omrod base this on the three aspects of gender that Sandra Harding theorized in relation to the gendering of science relations (Harding 1986: 57). It is my contribution to consider a representation of an author (such as the name of the composer) as gender symbolism.
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171 vocalists are represented in the credits, this shows that this is the normal gender pattern and this will increase the percentage of male composers and female vocalists, and so on.16 In histories of Western music and in historical musicological curricula, the focus is mostly on composers and their works, far less on performers or other agents. This comes from the conflation of authorship and authority, as Nicholas Cook argues, and is a symptom of ‘a quite general antipathy towards the idea of art being a communal production’ (Cook 1995–1996: 31).17 Western music history is almost exclusively a story about male composers. On the one hand, there seems a practical reason for this situation: we have access to the work of past composers by their scores.18 Performances from the far past, sounding compositions or improvisations,
16 ‘We shall see many examples of a recursive relation between the material and the representational. Representations shape material practices (to be told that engineering is a job for men increases the percentage of engineers who are male). But the material is itself a source of meaning (if I see that of ten engineers nine are men, this tells me something about both engineering and men).’ (Cockburn & Omrod 1993: 7)
17 ‘It is the conflation of authorship and authority – a conflation equally characteristic of Romanticism and modernism – that explains the remarkable difficulty we seem to have in theorising, rather than swerving away from, multiple authorship in music [...]. What make the difficulty remarkable is that multiple authorship is such a common phenomenon.’ (Cook 1995–1996: 31)
18 In Western classical music, composers to a large extent create music in the form of musical notation on paper: a musical score. Especially before the age of sound recording, the score is often the main artefact or trace that remains of a composition. The score is related, but not identical, to the concept of the musical work (Goehr 1992). In Western classical music, the score prescribes and determines the musical work to a large extent (Davies 2001). But scores are nothing without the musical knowledge, skills and practices to interpret and perform them. Much essential musical information does not exist in musical scores, but in the musical practices of performers. Composers need to base their compositions on the knowledge and skills of performers. Moreover, often compositions are written for a specific performer, who may have a great influence on the composition. Performers are essential for Western classical music. Not only do they transform sheet music into sound, they also influence musical style and technique. One could say that both composers and performers collaborate in the creation of musical pieces (see the references to Cook below). Davies however adheres to a strict division of musical work and performance:
The performer’s choices do not affect the work’s properties but do affect properties of the performance and, thereby, properties of the interpretation provided by that performance. [...] In giving credit to the performer’s creativity, it is neither necessary nor usual to regard her as a co-creator of the work, as opposed to its interpreter. (Davies 2001: 111).
De Groot (2008) argues that the possibility of different interpretations of a musical score is essential for Western musical compositions and tradition to live on. He analyses the complexity of ‘thick transmission’ of information, knowledge, skills, practices, experiences and ideology that complements the score, by way of oral and kinetic transmissions of the composer, of the first performer(s), and later of their former pupils and colleagues, and of other experts, both by live interpersonal contact and by audio or audiovisual recordings, and by way of other writings.
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172 are lost. But on the other hand, the different status of composer and performer is not so much related to technology as to socio-cultural structures and ideology.19 For a century now, sound recording technology has made it possible for at least an important part of the creative work of musical performers to outlive the performance as well as the performers, and to be multiplied and distributed; but it is remarkable that recordings
It is impossible – nor is it desirable – for a composer to notate everything s/he envisages; the score would become unreadable. Composers and the chain of consecutive performers, relating to, and at the same time shaping the music tradition of their day, therefore all contribute to initiate and perpetuate genealogies of performance, by employing the forms of written, oral and kinetic transmission discussed. [...] In spite of all these ‘measures’ by composers towards sonic determination, performers are always confronted with daunting questions of interpretation. [...] In a literate tradition, writing has a certain dominance over other ways of transmission. Writing leaves a varying, but always considerable scope to the performer for his/her own decision-making in the field of energy patterns, and this gives opportunity to the continuous renewal of the interpretation of written traditions, such as Western classical and new music. (De Groot 2008: 223)
De Groot shows some of the choices with which subsequent performers are faced when performing the score. While at first it seems that by thick transmission the intentions of the composer are communicated as much as possible, it later becomes clear that the new performer makes her own (well- informed) choices with regard to the additional sources of information she consults and with regard to the interpretation of the score. It turns out that it is not possible to know the intentions of the composer unambiguously, and that there may be a difference between what some report that the composer said, what is written in the score, and what might be best for the performance of the piece. Moreover, by taking into account theoretical considerations such as Taruskin’s notions of ‘perfect’ and ‘adequate’ performance, De Groot adds additional layers of considerations with regard to the performance/interpretation of a score.
19 Nicholas Cook (1999) criticizes the hegemony of the compositional score and compositional structure (thus, the composers’ work) in (generative) musical analysis (such as by Wallace Berry, Eugene Narmour, Fred Lerdahl, Eric Clarke, Neil Todd), to which the performers’ work is subordinated because the analysis of the score prescribes what a good performance is.
[Narmour] frequently stipulates what the performer must or must not do, judging one performance correct and another incorrect. [...] [T]heory, it ssems, is not committed to understanding performers in the way it is to understanding composers. [...] The assumption that theory exerts some kind of hegemony over performance is so entrenched that Narmour simply doesn’t consider the possibility that the failure to understand what a performer does might be a reflection on the theory rather than on the performance. (Cook 1999: 240–241).
Lerdahl and Narmour both eliminate the musician as an individual, and replace him or her by a theory whose input is some kind of musical text and whose ultimate output is some kind of aesthetic judgment; like all music theorists, perhaps, they explain music without musicians. But perhaps the most striking example of this kind of elimination of the musician as an individual is represented by the work of Eric Clarke, Neil Todd, and other proponents of the generative approach to musical performance. Their outstanding success in explicating some of the cognitive schemata underlying musical performance has come at the expense of interpreting ‘expression’ – traditionally seen as the core of performers’ individuality – as itself an epiphenomenon of structure; performers introduce rubato and other deviations from the notated music, they claim, in order to project or bring out (in a word, to express) its underlying structure. [...T]he effect is to explain expression away, and with it the performer; the music is seen as expressing nothing but itself. (Cook 1999: 242–243)
As an alternative, Cook states that both ‘composers and performers collaborate in the creation and maintenance of the repertory’ (Cook 1999: 245).
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173 remained beyond the domain of historical musicology to a large extent. 20 It is only in the last decade or two that sound recordings have become more important for the study of Western classical music.21 For audience and fans, performers are stars: powerful and adored.22 But in the domains of musicology and law, the status of performers is lower.
20 In 1999, José A. Bowen could still state that ‘While scores, reviews, memoirs, handbills, programmes, and music society records are familiar musicological territory, recordings need to be added as another important source of documentary evidence.’ (Bowen 1999: 436) In 2009, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson wrote: ‘The idea of studying performances, in the plural, may seem strange’ (Leech- Wilkinson 2009: 1.1¶1), ‘musical academia has on the whole, at any rate until recently, taken a fairly dim view of recordings’ (1.2¶18), ‘[a]cademics, in fact, are coming very late to the study of recorded performance’ (1.2.1¶22) and ‘the time to study performances through recordings has come. For the first time, to a significant body of musicologists it seems sensible and desirable.’ (1.3¶ 42). Leech-Wilkinson argues that the musicological study of recorded performances developed quite recently because of the accumulation of recordings after 100 years of sound recording. He also argues that it is the availability of (cheaper and faster) digital technology (digital recordings / CDs and analysis software on personal computers) that made a turn towards recordings possible. At an earlier stage it was possible to analyse sound recordings with computers, but it was time consuming and could only be done on large systems to which access was limited (see Cogan 1984 referred to below). However, ideological changes, described elaborately by Leech-Wilkinson, are as important as technological changes in this respect.
21 In the last decade or two, we see a shift in focus towards sound recording and performance studies within musicology. The first publication came from the margins of the discipline, with e.g. Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music by filmmaker Michael Chanan (1995) and A Century of Recorded Music: Listening to musical history (2000) by Timothy Day, curator at the Sound Archive of the British Library. Later publications include Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (2004, rev. 2010), ed. by Mark Katz; The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (2009), ed. by Nicholas Cook et al.; Recorded Music: Performance, Culture and Technology (2010), ed. by Amanda Bayley, and more. The British Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM, 2004–2009) and the Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (2009–2014), and the research of Eric Clarke, Renée Timmers, Luke Windsor, José A. Bowen, among others, are also examples of the turn to (recorded) performance. Theodore Gracyk considers recordings as the primary texts of rock music (Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock. London: Tauris, 1996). A remarkable earlier publication on the use of sound recording and analysis technology for the analysis of musical performances of various musical styles, is New Images of Musical Sound (1984) by Robert Cogan. The study of sound recordings was always more important for the study of music in which the score has a minor role (if at all), such as non-western music, pop/rock music and jazz. For a long time a sociological approach was predominant in the study of these musics; but a musical-analytical approach based on recordings has been gaining terrain for these genres too. Electro- acoustic music studies has always paid attention to the analysis of sound recordings such as fixed media compositions (tape music), as well as to the problematics of such analysis. Richard Taruskin (2005) argues that musical literacy in the form of musical notation and score reading, which is of central importance to the Western classical music practice and tradition, is coming to an end, due to the prevalence of sound recording technology for the composition, performance, consumption and distribution of music, among others. However, I consider musical recording as a kind of writing (écriture) that could involve another kind of musical literacy, hybridized with other, old and new forms of writing; as already can be found in various contemporary music practices and studies. This topic is beyond the scope of my current study; a previous attempt to theorize as well as practise one of such new forms of musical writing is my notion of the ‘extended score’ (Bosma 2005, 2007b, 2008a, see also Chapter VIII).
22 See also Cook (1999: 245); and Cook (1995–1996: 32–33) for the contradiction between the popular acknowledgement of performers as stars and the disappearance of performers in musicological
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174 Composers, not performers, have the status of authors. The author/composer's work is considered to be original, creative and personal, but a performer is considered to be more like a manufacturer, executing and materialising the instructions of the author, reproducing the author's musical creation. This dichotomy of composer vs. performer is related to other dichotomies such as intellect vs. body, spiritual vs. material, form vs. matter, master vs. slave, production vs. reproduction, and masculine vs. feminine.23 With regard to author’s rights, two different traditions are distinguished: the Continental droit d'auteur and the Anglo-American copyright. For the Continental tradition, a milestone is the Berne Convention in 1886;24 it is centred around the figure of the author and has commercial (the property right of publication) as well as moral aspects (to protect the integrity of the author and his work). Copyright is centred around the monopoly to make copies; the owner of the copyright may not be the creator of the work; copyright lacks the moral aspect.25 In practice, however, the discourse. ‘In the case of classical music, then, the contradiction in authorship discourse is essentially between how music is experienced and how it is written about.’ (Cook 1995–1996: 33)
23 Cook also links the hegemony of composition above performance to gender, both on ideological and historical grounds: ‘The story of the legitimation of music as composition at the expense of music as performance could clearly be told in gendered terms: it would link the Hegelian identification of the Ideal as male (versus the particular as female) with the historical circumstances under which women became established in the sphere of performance long before they did in the sphere of composition.’ (Cook 1999: 244n28) Suzanne G. Cusick carefully argues that American musicology was constituted as masculine (citing Charles Seeger that he wanted ‘”to avoid the incipient criticism that musicology was “woman’s work”’, Cusick 1999a: 472) and that this implied the devaluation of musical performance: ‘The resulting masculine identity of institutional musicology in the United States has led to the establishment of implicitly gendered hierarchies within American musical life – especially academic musical life – that systematically devalue music performance and music education.’ (Cusick 1999a: 480) See also Chapter I. For feminist analytical accounts of compositions from the perspective of the performer, see for example Waterman (1994), which highlights the relation composer–performer and the creative interpretation of the performer, and Cusick (1994), for an analytical approach from the perspective of bodily performance.
24 The Berne Convention was implemented in The Netherlands in 1912.
25 The position of the singer/musician in the American Copyright Act is beyond the scope of my study. The difference between American copyright and Continental author’s rights caused complications in international dealings with rights related to recordings, performers and producers, which do not fall under the Berne convention. The USA did not subscribe to the Rome Convention but did sign the international WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty of the World International Property Organization later. The WPPT is considered by the WIPO as an update of the Rome convention, addressing issues related to digital technologies (http://www.wipo.int/copyright/en/activities/wct_wppt/wct_wppt.html, accessed 26 July 2012). The
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175 two traditions have many features in common, especially since the USA joined the Berne Convention in 1989. 26 Composers are considered as authors and their rights are protected by the Berne Convention. Proposals for revisions to include performers in the Berne Convention or to protect performers by way of another international agreement were opposed by author’s organisations and were related to the historical primacy of authors; they were founded on the idea that performers are not authors and that performances are not works.27 The advent of recording technology and radio seemed to some a threat to performers, an unfair competition. But it was only much later, after phonogram manufacturers and broadcasting organisations were considered to have a related need for protection,28 that the International Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organisations was adopted in Rome in 1961.29 The rights protecting performers, record producers and broadcasting organisations are called ‘neighbouring rights’ and are quite similar to (but more restricted than) author’s rights; but composers and performers are still considered as different categories. In discussing neighbouring rights Paul Goldstein (1994) states that ‘these diluted, low-rise rights merely border on the cathedral of author’s rights’ (Goldstein 1994: 192).
international legal details of the rights of composers and performers are beyond the scope of my study. My focus is on the conceptual-cultural differences between the categories of author and performer as can be found in various cultural artefacts and practices.
26 See Du Bois (1996).
27 See Heevel (2007).
28 Author’s rights too were developed from the economic interests of distributors (book printers, sellers and publishers), who in the 18th century came up with the idea of the author and his rights as legal arguments in their struggle to retain their copyright monopoly as long as possible (Rose 1994). Mark Rose argues that copyright law played an important role in the development of the notion of the author. ‘[T]he Romantic elaboration of such notions as originality, organic form, and the work of art as the expression of the unique personality of the artist was in a sense the necessary completion of the legal and economic transformation that occurred during the copyright struggle.’ (Rose 1994: 53) The notion of the author is inherently tied to the notion of the work. The distinction between mind and matter was essential for the notion of the author and his rights, to distinguish it from manual labour (Rose 1994: 35–36). Moreover, the notions of the author and his work were a reification of the complex social process of literary production: ‘The complex social process of literary production consisting of relations between writers and patrons, writers and booksellers, booksellers and readers, was rendered peripheral. Abstracting the author and the work from the social fabric in this way contributed to a tendency already implicit in printing technology to reify the literary composition, to treat the text as a thing.’ (Rose 1994: 36)
29 The Rome Convention was implemented in Dutch law in 1993.
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176
De koninklijke weg van het auteursrecht is de uitvoerende kunstenaar niet gegeven. (Heevel 2007: 125)30
Remarkably, translators do have their own author's rights as ‘second authors’,while it can be argued that their work is no more creative than the work of a musical performer.31 Moreover, in the Rome Convention neighbouring rights are conferred to people directly contributing to an artistic production, but the creativity of that contribution is not of primary importance: creative artistes interprètes (e.g. solists, conductors, directors), less creative artistes exécutants (members of an orchestra, choir or corps de ballet), the organisationally and financially responsible phonogram producers and broadcasting organisations all have neighbouring rights (Heevel 1996, 2007).
[D]e ratio om tot bescherming te komen [is] vooral gelegen in de ‘skill and labour’ en niet zozeer in de hoogstpersoonlijke creatieve inbreng van de rechtssubjecten, zoals in het auteursrecht voorop staat. (Heevel 2007: 125)32
In response to Barthes’ ‘death of the Author’ and to the (feminist) criticism it invoked,33 Carolyn Abbate (1993) argues that ‘[d]ebates about author politics need to be
30 ‘The royal road of author’s rights is not given to performers.’ (Translation by Hannah Bosma.)
31 See Heevel (2007).
32 ‘The rationale behind protection [of performers and producers] lies more in “skill and labour”, and less in the personal creative contribution of the legal subject that is foremost in author’s rights.’ (Translation by Carolyn Muntz.)
33 Barthes (1977 [1968]: 142):
In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the following sentence: ‘This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.’ Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing ‘literary’ ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic Psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.
Barthes stresses that in a literary text, there is no singular message of the author to find; the text is, ultimately indeterminately, formed by multiple discourses. But, as the example above shows, and contrary to Barthes’ own words, this does not make the text neutral. Specific discourses on gender, not neutral at all, can be found in this and other texts; whether these discourses are affirmed, criticized, ridiculed, de- constructed, converted, perverted or denied, remains an interesting topic for discussion. Naomi Schor criti- cizes Barthes for neutralising sexual difference into ‘the discourse of in-difference’, which is ‘the dominant male discourse on sexuality in poststructuralist France’ (Schor 1987: 99). This denied sexual difference can
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177 entirely rethought when we move from the written textual genres that inspired them to live performed arts, whose phenomenologies are another matter’ (Abbate 1993: 234). Music needs performers to exist, and ‘the performer in some sense usurps the authorial voice’ (Abbate 1993: 234). A performer, ‘”making” music’(or ‘”creating” a role’) is a ‘second author’, ‘who completes the work in her (or his) own interpretation’ (Abbate 1993: 234-5), and on whom the composer is dependent. However, the interdependency of composer and performer is often contested. Abbate points out that the strange role of performers as a second author is often perceived as threatening. Composers often complain about performers; Abbate’s example is ‘Wagner’s tirades against the singers who interpreted his music’ (Abbate 1993: 234).34 But despite these strong statements, Abbate seems ambivalent in assigning authorial power to the singers.35 The phenomenology of music, with performers as ‘second authors’, is for Abbate a point of
be seen as ‘another mode of denying women’ (Jane Gallop, Schor 1987: 100). At the same time, in Barthes’ writing a myth of femininity returns, as Stephen Heath and Schor (1987: 100) point out; this can be conceived on the one hand as an utopic, non-phallic order, on the other hand as a repetition and reinforcement of the existing traditional stereotypical myth of femininity.
34 Elsewhere, Abbate makes an even stronger statement, contrasting an ontological actor-network model of the musical work with the hierarchical chain of composer–work–performer:
If musical works are phantoms inhabiting a network connecting composer, inscription, performer, interpretation, realization, and reproduction, relationships within this space are full of antagonism. Since singers can and often do improvise, composers seek ways to control them, hoping for the invaluable puppet who neither adds nor subtracts, and more than this, who is physically galvanized by a compositional utterance. (Abbate 2001: xiii–xiv)
Composers often do not accept the distance between themselves and their scores, and the creative subjectivity of interpreters and performers. In his case study of Apparances, De Groot (2008: 227) notes a tension between the composer Ton de Leeuw and the commissioner, dedicatee and first performer Monique Bartels. Bartels had cooperated closely with De Leeuw, she speaks of ‘finding together’ and ‘co-invention’. But in a later stage, the composer came with prescriptions that differed from what they had earlier invented together. ‘Apparences belongs to that strand of Western music tradition in which the composer assumes the final responsibility for the written text.’ (De Groot 2008: 227) However, this story does not end here; see above.
35 Abbate states:
Thus if we ask whose are the originating voices in opera (who, that is, do we assume is singing?) we do not only mean “Which singers are singing at the performance?” We also mean “How do we conceive the origins of the sonorities - verbal and musical - that we are hearing?” [...] Musical performance enacts a bizarre drama, in which the performers - as noisy sources of resonance - shout out that they are creating the work literally before our ears (and eyes). We know that this is not true: Wagner wrote Tristan. But at the same time we are deluded by the transgressive acoustics of authority that operate during performance. No single [...] composer’s voice sings what we hear. Rather, the music seemingly has other sources: it strongly encourages listeners to split the sonorous fabric into multiple originating speakers, whose bodies exist behind what is heard. (Abbate 1993: 235)
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178 departure to find multiple metaphorical ‘voices’ in the music.36 Her musical examples are from the score and the libretto. She does not analyse specific creative performances by specific singers and does not refer directly to recordings or performances. For Abbate the vocal performer is merely an inspiration for her development of alternative strategies of listening-interpretation. Abbate stresses the importance of live performance. She argues that singers have power because of their live bodily presence on the stage, and that electronic technology would have a negative effect: “operatic performances are in fact exaggeratedly pure in their liveness, since no technology (amplification) is supposed ever to interfere” (Abbate 1993: 234).37 However, a real female voice figures in Abbate’s article (1993) only as doubly mediated by electronic technology. Abbate starts her essay with the description of a scene from the film Mascara (1978) by Patrick Conrad. In a nightclub called Mister Butterfly, transvestite Pepper dresses as Eurydice and performs a part of Gluck’s Orfeo by lip-synching a recording of a female singer. In this scene, the taped female singing
36 For Abbate, vocal performance as such turns out to be more an inspiration or foundation and a way of insisting on the difference of music with regard to literary theory, than a main concern; her notion of multiple ‘voices’ is a turn of Edward Cone’s notion of musical voice and is inspired by the polyphonic voices that Bakhtin theorized for literature (Abbate 1991: 10–19, 252-3n7).
What I mean by ‘voice’ is, of course, not literally vocal performance, but rather a sense of certain isolated and rare gestures in music, whether vocal or nonvocal, that my be perceived as modes of subjects’ enunciations. [...] Although I do not discuss (except in short asides) specific performers or performances, my discussion of performance in its figural sense – as the sound, through time, made by musical voices – may serve as a necessary reminder that music is written by a composer, but made and given phenomenal reality by performers. (Abbate 1991: ix–x).
I have chosen to mention only briefly specific singers or nights at the opera. That elaborate rhapsodies to singers or to actual performances are largely absent from this book may well seem a great irony, even a fatal defect. But if one’s impulse is to honor performance, to push thinking about music toward the strange moment when music is realized, created, and at that instant dies away, I think that this might also be served by other means, and not surprisingly, my means are abstract. (Abbate 2001: xii)
37Abbate uses the term ‘technology’ here in a traditional, narrow way as ‘electronic apparatus’. Gender and Technology Studies criticizes this use of the term ‘technology’ as excluding women. Gender and Technology Studies considers ‘technology’ not only as high tech apparatuses, but also as the surrounding practices like production and consumption. And by considering older, non high tech practices like house- hold technology (e.g., the baby bottle), more women come into view. Likewise, it is possible to consider the techniques of singing, architecture and acoustics (necessary for opera) as technology. An important goal of these technologies of opera is amplification. According to Sundberg (1987) the ‘singer’s formant’ (i.e., resonance/amplification in the vocal tract of the higher formant frequencies) causes the singers to be heard above the orchestra. This requires a specific vocal technique and years of training. In this sense, the opera voice is very artificial. The necessity for opera - singers to be heard in a large room above an orchestra without electronic amplification, is in my opinion often at the expense of the ‘liveliness’ of the sound, excluding a diversity of timbres and vocal variety and masking vocal details.
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179 voice has an authorial status and is the permanent material basis for the live performance; the male transvestite creates an evanescent, interpretative performance. Whereas in a normal operatic performance, the score, authored by the (mostly male) composer is the permanent material basis for any live performance by singers and musicians.
In lip-synching drag acts, the text being performed is not the operatic passage in question (an excerpt from Orfeo, authored by Gluck), which has receded to a more distant remove. Rather, the text is the female singer’s voice, Eurydice-sound, authored by, say, Benita Valente, and caught forever on tape. This taped voice is the permanent material basis for generating a performance (Pepper’s lipsynching and miming), just as a score of Orfeo - paper and ink and binding - constitutes a permanent material basis for any live performance of the opera. On the Mister Butterfly stage, female voices make the sound- text that sets biologically male puppets spinning in an interpretive dance. In this sound-text the women’s singing voices themselves have an explicitly authorial force, and these strange lip-synching scenes represent women as the makers of the musical sonority in opera. (Abbate 1993: 228)
With the advent of audio and visual recording technology, performance can become a permanent, authoritative text. When recorded, the musical work of a singer is repeatable, distributable and longlasting, after the moment of performance and after the death of the singer. It can be listened to and analysed again and again. Through sound recording, the music of the singer can be perceived beyond the reach of the singer herself. Recorded, the creative work of the performer can acquire a status comparable to a composition: permanent, reproducible and authoritative. For singer-composers like Joan La Barbara, Diamanda Galás or Laurie Anderson, sound recording is very important for their work; especially so because extended vocal techniques, a specific timbre or a special way of speaking or singing, subtle timing and intonation, are all features which cannot be notated adequately and are essential for their work. The same is true for many vocalists in pop/rock music, in which there is not a standard way of singing and the specific sound of a particular voice is a very important, identifying element. Sound recording technology has contributed to the extension and proliferation of the work of the (often female) vocalist.38 Whether she made it on her own or co-produced it with others, the work of the vocalist is an inextricable and essential part of a musical piece consisting of
38 But of course other influences were also important: for example, the search for new sounds in avant- garde music and performance art.
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180 recorded vocal sounds. Thus, the roles of vocalist and composer could be considered as changed or merged. As a (co-)creator of a permanent recorded object consisting of an interpretation, improvisation or tape-composition, it seems fair to assign the vocalist the status of an author. But sound technology did not eliminate the dichotomy of composer and performer. Although the art of performance-interpretation or improvisation is, when recorded, available as a lasting object for analysis (for example to compare different performances of the same composition, or to analyse an improvisation) musicology of Western classical music was for a long time,, and to a large extent still is, predominantly concerned with scores and with composers. And although one can argue that in pop, rock or avant-garde tape music the work of the composer and the work of the vocalist/instrumentalist are essentially intertwined, the distinction between composer and performer is still important with regard to musical author's rights.39 One of the features of the emancipation of (often female) vocalists in pop/rock music is the fact that nowadays they are often credited not just as performers but also as (co-)composers and (co-)producers. Thus, vocalists became authors by formally becoming composers, rather than by a change in the concepts of author and performer.40 Essential features of most electroacoustic music are the creative use of recording technology and the composition of musical parameters that cannot be represented adequately with traditional musical notation. What does this infer for the roles of composer and vocalist? In Chapter V, the relation between the composer and vocalist in Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) has been discussed. The work of the vocalist and the composer is interwoven in Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), but only the composer Berio is considered the author of this piece and vocalist Berberian is often not even mentioned. I
39 Keith Negus states it as follows:
Although performance has been increasingly acknowledged as a theoretical issue, and despite the critical recognition accorded to performers (whether improvising jazz musicians, pre-pop crooners, or girl groups), it is the originating author (the composing songwriter) who holds a privileged place in the economic and cultural valuing of creativity (rights revenue is allocated to the song ‘writer’ and not the interpreter). (Negus 2011: 610)
40 Nicholas Cook makes a related remark that ‘Perhaps the best indication of [the marginalisation of performance] is the way in which [...] we establish the aesthetic legitimacy of performers by demonstrating that they aren’t just performers but in some sense composers.’ (Cook 1995–1996: 33)
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181 also showed that a reconsideration of the vocalist’s work can inspire a different interpretation of the composition. In the current chapter, I discuss the relationship between vocalist and composer with regard to several other compositions. These compositions show different kinds of relations between vocalist and composer in the music and surrounding texts (programme notes, sleeve notes, announcements, stage presentation, etc.). My concern is with the composer and vocalist as apparent in these different (musical and non-musical) texts, not with the real, empirical, flesh-and-blood composer and vocalist. By broadening the notion of the musical work with its con-texts, it becomes impossible to posit a strict line between the apparent and the real author/composer/vocalist. The real author/composer/vocalist becomes as it were a text him-/herself. In any case, one can never have access to a real author-as-author without taking into consideration all kinds of texts of this author. Moreover, the interest in a real or implied author is embedded in an ideology of authorship. By extending such issues of authorship to the work of the vocalist, I grant the vocalist not only the status but also the demise of the author. The last part of this chapter deals with ‘the death of the vocalist’: the critical (mis)use of recorded voices.
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182 VII.2.1 Visage: Improvisation incorporated in a composition
Berio’s next electro-vocal composition after Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) is Visage (1961). This work consists mainly, and most prominently, of the voice of Cathy Berberian uttering all kinds of sounds and only one word: ‘parole’. For this composition, Berio asked Berberian to improvise according to a few, vague instructions (Berberian in Stoïanova 1985: 70). The recording of this improvisation forms the main part of Visage; Berio made a montage of it and added electronic sounds and manipulations in the back- ground (Osmond-Smith 1991: 64). Berberian’s sighing, crying, laughing, moaning, groaning, stammering and singing, and her many other non-verbal vocal sounds, are the most striking features of Visage. These sounds shocked the Radio of Milano and made them consider Visage as ‘obscene’ (Osmond-Smith 1991: 64), ‘indecent’ (Stoïanova 1985: 71) and ‘too pornographic’ (Berberian in Stoïanova 1985: 71). Although Visage was made in the Studio of Phonology of the Radio of Milano, it was not broadcast in full (Stoïanova 1985: 71). With Visage, vocal production and improvisation – features that usually are considered as part of performance – now form a permanent, reproducible, distributable product, a tape composition, a musical work. The creative role of the female voice in Visage is more openly acknowledged than in Thema: Berberian is often mentioned as improviser. But Berberian is not considered as a co-composer or co-author, although Berio and Berberian worked together making Visage, and Berberian's particular voice and improvisations form the main part of the composition. Berberian is mentioned in the sleeve notes, but her place is less prominent than Berio’s.41 In the sleeve notes of the CD
41 On the LP CE 31027 LUCIANO BERIO, the piece is presented as: ‘VISAGE for magnetic tape, based on the voice of CATHY BERBERIAN and electronic sounds’. It is clear that Berberian has a prominent place in these credits. This contrasts with the comment by Berio: after 31 lines of abstract thoughts about the piece in relation to language and music, he states in the penultimate sentence: ‘The voice is that of Cathy Berberian.’ The voice is objectified; Berberian is not presented as a creative (in fact: improvising) subject or person. In the sleeve notes of the CD ACOUSMATRIX 7 (BV Haast CD 9109), Konrad Boehmer partly cites Berio’s comment as it was published in the sleeve notes of the LP. But Boehmer adds his own opinion about the importance of Berberian’s share:
As a matter of fact, the vivacity of Visage is based for a considerable part on the universal vocal virtuosity of the late Cathy Berberian (who also lent her voice for Thema), who, by crying, laughing or wailing, creates a kind of meta-piece which can be situated between music and radio-phantasmagory. Thus she unchains the singer’s voice from the classical conceptions of singing.
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183 42 LUCIANO BERIO – MANY MORE VOICES (BMG 1998), the same statement is repeated. Although most of the compositions on the BVHaast CD43 with electronic works by Berio and Maderna mainly consist of Berberian’s voice,44 her name is not on the cover; only the names of composers Berio and Maderna. And in Dreßen’s (1982) analysis (just as in his analysis of Thema),45 Berberian is not mentioned at all; he does not even mention that the voice in this piece is a female voice. Strangely, he does mention that in the end, ‘a kind of electronic man’s choir comes out’ of the sound mass (Dreßen 1982: 92). Otherwise, he only writes about ‘a voice’. Stoïanova suggests that Berberian’s art is unconscious by writing that ‘her voice’ ‘invented the expressive utterances’ (Stoïanova 1985: 67). According to Stoïanova, ‘the author’ (i.e. Berio) is ‘the owner of the body, matter, sensuality and compositional technique’ and ‘composes a coherent version’ by his ‘compositional cutting’ (Stoïanova 1985: 71). Here, Berio is presented as the male composer-author who is in control, who made a coherent, unitary artwork and who masters and owns its ‘material’, i.e. female voice Berberian. Again we see the opposition of author/mind/control/composer/owner vs. voice/body/matter. According to the texts accompanying Visage, the male composer-author organized (i.e. predominantly the work of the mind) the piece and is the most important. The female vocalist is assigned a less prominent place (some acknowledge her creative share more than others). But why not say that she produced the most striking part of the composition by her vocal art, vocal sound production and improvisation (i.e., work of body and mind)? The ambiguous authorial relation between Berio and Berberian is
Boehmer’s words present Berberian as a creative subject, as an important co-creator of Visage.
42 BMG 09026-68302-2.
43 ACOUSMATRIX 7, BERIO/MADERNA: ELECTRONIC WORKS, BV Haast CD 9109.
44According to Osmond-Smith (1991), Maderna’s Dimensioni II consists of Berberian’s reading of a phonetic text by Hans G. Helms, ‘infusing it with whatever intonations her imagination might suggest’ (63). In the sleeve notes of the CD ACOUSMATRIX 7, Berberian is not mentioned in relation to Dimensioni II.
This piece is based on phonemes composed by the poet Hans G. Helms[...] Though the phonemes have no concrete meaning, the way they are pronounced creates specific ‘rhetoric gestures’. The piece is composed in a free technique which Maderna has often used in his electroacoustical pieces: listening carefully to the material and then taking on-the-spot decisions on its disposition within the musical texture. (Konrad Boehmer)
We do not read here who pronounced the phonemes and to whose voice Maderna was listening.
45 See Chapter V.
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184 illustrated by Osmond-Smith’s remark that Berio ‘allowed Berberian’s fertile imagination its head’ (Osmond-Smith 1991: 63). Berio is the composer-author who gave Berberian’s creative voice a large and important place (the ‘central core’ according to Osmond-Smith 1991: 64) in this composition; and Berberian’s voice is for ever an indissoluble part of this musical work.46
VII.2.2 La Barbara: A musical portrait of a singer-composer
La Barbara: The Name, The Sounds, The Music (1991) for voice and computer music on tape 47 by Larry Austin is another electroacoustic composition with female voice by a male composer. But the relation between author and voice in this piece is uncommon. ‘La Barbara was commissioned and composed for performance by the accomplished and acclaimed singer and composer, Joan La Barbara’, is the first sentence of the sleeve notes. In La Barbara: The Name, The Sounds, The Music, we hear fragments of an interview by composer Larry Austin with singer-composer Joan La Barbara: ‘thirty three moments extracted from our recorded conversation, moments chosen because they seemed an essence of a facet of her career as a singer/vocalist/composer’, according to Larry Austin in the sleeve notes. In the tape part, Joan La Barbara tells about her name and the sound of her name (The Name); about the vocal sounds she makes (The Sounds); she describes why she uses certain sounds and how she composes her vocal sounds (The Music). Joan La Barbara tells how she acquired her name when she married. The marriage lasted only ten months, but she kept the name after changing it slightly, because she liked the sound of this name: it had a better ‘flow’ than her own name. Then she demonstrates what she means by vocally performing her name, by making the ‘flow’ she hears in this name explicit by the intonation and timing of her voice. One also hears her
46 I will not elaborate on a musical analysis of Visage here, having already devoted a whole chapter to Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (Chapter V). But the terms ‘obscene’ and ‘pornographic’ already hint to some interesting material, as well as the following observation by Simon Emmerson: ‘The soloist is not only a prisoner in an increasingly oppressive sound world, but one in which sonic violence is evidently to suppress her voice (literally).’ (Emmerson 2007: 78)
47 Recording on CDCM CMS 13, Centaur Records, CRC 2166, with Joan La Barbara, soprano.
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185 improvising on the sounds of her name, and improvising with other non-verbal extended vocal sounds. On the tape part, La Barbara’s vocal sounds are treated so that they keep their own character: the electronic processing stresses the richness of these sounds and does not destroy or overwhelm La Barbara’s voice. In a live performance of the composition, one also hears and sees Joan La Barbara live, doing vocal improvisati- on on the stage, accompanying the playback of the tape. The author-composer of La Barbara: The Name, The Sound, The Music is Larry Austin. But in this composition, the vocalist is presented as another author, not only of other compositions, but also of her vocal art: her vocal sound production and her vocal improvisation. This is done by a juxtaposition of different discourses of hers: 1. telling about her work and her authorship in a recorded interview; 2. recorded vocal improvisation with non-verbal vocal sound; 3. Joan La Barbara as improvising live performer, visible for the audience. In the interview, La Barbara explains her non-verbal vocal art. Through this embedding, her non-verbal vocal sounds are presented as her creative, authorial, and conscious musi- cal discourse. This is quite different from nineteenth-century opera and classic Hollywood film, where in the narrative the non-verbal ‘cry’ of the female character is an involuntary and powerless cry of fear or death, as discussed in Chapter III.48 Moreover, through the combination of the interview, the processed improvisations on the tape part, and the text in the sleeve notes, it is stressed that the vocalist on stage is not just performing someone else's composition, but that she, through her improvisation and creation of vocal sound, is a creative agent. The story which Joan La Barbara tells about her name is very significant. It stresses the connection between her authorship and her vocal sound. Her name is presented as a consciously chosen artist-author's name. By improvising with it, this name is integrated into her vocal art. This name has a typical feminine history: it was acquired through marriage. But this name soon changed its status, not being the name of her husband any more, but being chosen, appropriated and changed on musical grounds. In this composition La Barbara is presented as an embodied, plural author, referring to other works outside the composition. But she does not have the status of
48 See also Dame (1994), Poizat (1992 [1986]), Silverman (1988), Bosma (1995).
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186 the author of this composition itself, though she partook in its creation for a large part: as initiator she commissioned it, and as collaborator she produced the text, the vocal sounds and the improvisations. Author-composer Larry Austin created the framework, the structure. As a listener, I would say that this composition is a co-production or co- creation by two co-authors. However, this is not the case: only Larry Austin is mentioned as the author-composer, it is his composition (and it is registered as such at BMI). La Barbara’s name is in the title. Larry Austin calls the composition a portrait – and commissioned portraits indeed are similar complex works with two different kinds of subjects: the author/painter/photographer and the subject portrayed. Joan La Barbara is object of this composition, and subject in the composition. She is also subject ‘outside’ or ‘before’ this composition, because she commissioned it. Very explicit, and very real, a female voice is speaking in and through a composition of a male composer. However, reviewing a performance in the New York Times (September 12, 1996), critic Allan Kozinn takes the piece as a normal composition for female vocalist and tape, and puts Joan La Barbara in a passive, dependent role, when he for example states that ‘the work had Ms. La Barbara chirping, whispering, scat singing, clicking, chattering, panting and also singing’. He even judges that ‘the inclusion of excerpts from a discussion between Mr. Austin and Ms. La Barbara in the work itself seemed a misstep’, thereby rejecting the central theme of the work: Joan La Barbara as subject.49 When I asked composer Larry Austin whether La Barbara can only be performed by Joan La Barbara herself, his answer was:
Never been asked about this, not even by Joan, herself. The piece could be performed by another soprano/vocalist. There is no prohibition against this, except that I would have to approve of the performance; i.e., I would want to "audition" this person before sanctioning the performance. I own the piece and publish it. I control the rights to the piece and its performances. I can imagine that someday a person might want to perform it as a kind of homage to Joan. No problem.50
Thus, the composer stresses his position as a composer/author and he also places the composition in the conventional category of a work for female vocalist and tape, a
49 See http://www.music.unt.edu/cemi/LARevs.htm.
50 E-mail of Larry Austin to Hannah Bosma, 17 December 2002.
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187 work authored by one male composer to be performed by any female vocalist who is sanctioned by the composer. However, he also considers a (hypothetical) performance by another vocalist as a homage to Joan La Barbara, thus acknowledging her special position in the work. Joan La Barbara is well known as a composer-vocalist. She performs her own work, often using electronic sound technology,51 as well as the works of many avant- garde composers. She is also a composer of instrumental and electronic/computer music.52 In her discography53 a clear division is made between performances of her own works, of which she herself is the composer, and performances of works by other composers. La Barbara: The Name, The Sound, The Music is on the list of her performances of works by other composers, thus adhering to the traditional division between composer and performer, instead of the possibility of a more equivalent co- creation. Although subversive from within, the cultural position of La Barbara is ultimately determined by the traditional format.
VII.2.3 Voice as composition
Nadir & Zenit54(1992) by Greetje Bijma, Louis Andriessen and Sybren Polet is an example of an acknowledged co-production. Bijma and Andriessen made a musical composition of the text by Sybren Polet by recording their improvisation; in the sleeve notes both Bijma and Andriessen are mentioned as the musical authors. Louis Andriessen is well-known as a composer; he plays electronic keyboards in this piece. Greetje Bijma is a jazz and improvised music vocalist, using extended vocal techniques.55 In Nadir & Zenit she gives a vocal interpretation of Polet's text, with a great variety of timbres and vocal techniques, and with subtle tonal, rhythmic and
51 See VII.2.3.
52 See the long list on http://www.joanlabarbara.com (accessed 28 October 2012).
53 See http://www.joanlabarbara.com (accessed 28 October 2012).
54 BV Haast CD 9303; as a radio piece it won the Prix Italia in 1992.
55 Many CDs with her work are available via: BV Haast, ENJA Records. JARO Medien.
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188 timbral inflections. Such aspects of sound are of central importance in much avant- garde music. In most avant-garde electroacoustic music, the main focus is generally not on pitch and rhythm, parameters that are traditionally primary with regard to notation and composition (note-based music); but on other aspects of sound, of sound structure and of sound development (sound-based music).56 To a lesser extent, this is also true for avant-garde classical instrumental/vocal music; this came about under the influence of electroacoustic music but it is also an independent musical development, which influenced electroacoustic music in turn. (The work of Edgard Varèse [1883– 1965] shows how instrumental music was ahead of electroacoustic technological possibilities in the creation of sound-based music.) Sound recording technology facilitates the composition of a lasting musical object with musical and vocal parameters that are difficult to notate, such as particular timbres and singing techniques, and subtle tonal, rhythmic and timbral inflections. These vocal parameters are often the creative domain of vocalists. With regard to Nadir & Zenit vocalist Greetje Bijma is indeed acknowledged as co-author of the music. Electronic sound technology makes it possible for a vocalist to compose directly with vocal sound on tape. Singer-composers who compose by combining voice with electronics include Diamanda Galás, Shelley Hirsch, Greetje Bijma, Kristin Norderval, Franziska Baumann, Pamela Z and Joan La Barbara. Sound recording technology makes it possible to record a performance-interpretation of a score, to record an improvisation, or to compose with voice sound on tape. With a recording of a performance or an improvisation or with a tape-composition of her vocal sound, a singer becomes a creator of a permanent creative art object. An example of Joan La Barbara's own electro-vocal work is the CD album 57 SOUND PAINTINGS. She figures on this album not only as composer and vocalist, but also as player of quirro and maracas, as (recording and remix) engineer and as co- producer (other musicians and engineers are also mentioned). The pieces on this album consist of multi-layered recordings of her voice. Her vocal authority is stressed by the remark on the sleeve that ‘[a]ll of the vocal sounds on this CD were recorded in real time
56 For note-based vs. sound-based music, see Landy (2007).
57 Lovely Music LCD 3001, 1990 (individual pieces 1979, 1980, 1983, 1984, 1988).
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189 with no electronic manipulations and consist of both traditional and “extended” vocal techniques I have developed over the past twenty years.’ The sleeve notes of author- composer-vocalist La Barbara refer to her creation of the vocal sounds, to her development of extended vocal techniques and to her composition of the musical pieces. Thus, vocalising, musical creation and composition are presented as related activities by the same author-composer-vocalist. Another electro-vocal work by La Barbara, 73 Poems,58 is presented as a co- production between poet/visual artist Kenneth Goldsmith and composer-vocalist La Barbara (both names are on the cover), instead of a composer ‘using’ or ‘taking’ a text from a writer whose name is mentioned in a less prominent place. In the sleeve notes (by John Schaefer) this co-operation is highlighted and contrasted with the traditional situati- on, where writers were often wary of setting their verse to music (for example, Goethe refused Schubert’s request for permission to set his poetry). 73 Poems is co-authored rather than showing the stereotypical rivalry between the author of the text and the author of the music.
VII.2.4 Hildegard Westerkamp: Voices of a female author
In the work of Hildegard Westerkamp, her own speaking voice is often present. India Sound Journal consists of recordings of environmental sounds in India, combined with the projection of images made during the same journey and with Westerkamp’s voice. At the beginning of the performance in Montreal, September 1995, one heard Wester- kamp’s speaking voice without seeing anybody. She said: ‘I am in India,’ and mentioned a date in the past. Then one heard this same voice saying: ‘I am in Montreal,’ and she mentioned the date of that day. Hildegard Westerkamp seemed to have two voices, one in the past, one in the present. Confusion. Were these voices live or recorded? Then Hildegard Westerkamp herself came on the stage, and told with musical timing about her experiences in India: the confusing, overwhelming sensory perceptions, the large con-
58 Lovely Music LCD 3002, 1994.
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190 trasts; being immersed in a culture which is so different. At the same time, there were sounds and pictures of this experience. Here, the author is in the middle of the piece, referring to the author outside the piece, to the experiences of the author in another world. While at the same time ‘mastering’ her piece and her performance, this author is also telling about being overwhelmed and confused in another culture, in another place. By telling about her own experiences it is stressed that this female vocal per- former is not ‘just’ a vocalist-performer, but that she is the composer-author. The vocal and bodily presence of the author in this piece stresses that the composer-author is fema- le. Both are exceptional, since female vocalists are mostly performers and not composers, and composers are mostly male. Westerkamp’s presence in the piece stresses her subjectivity in different ways: 1. as speaking subject, using language and not being a vocal object; 2. as author; 3. as embodied subject. Her bodily presence is not on display, as female bodies often are; nor is her subjectivity disembodied, as is the case with the classical (male) author and with the Cartesian notion of the (universal=male) subject: Westerkamp is bodily present as an active subject. Her bodily presence indicates her specific, non-universal being; among her many characteristics, one finds that she is a white woman. 4. as a situated, non-universal subject,59 formed by a specific culture, being confu- sed and overwhelmed in another culture. The sound recordings and the pictures are presented as subjective: as being made by a specific subject, as an extension of her subjective listening experience and other sensory experiences. Normally, sound recording is conceived as a neutral, objective recording of reality. Westerkamp stresses the subjectivity of listening, and, as an extension of this, of recording: recording as an extended, subjective ear.
59 See Braidotti (1994).
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191 VII.2.5 Laurie Anderson: What is an author?
In her performances Laurie Anderson often tells stories about herself. In these stories she does not only figure as a person, but also as an artist, an author. The CD THE UGLY ONE 60 WITH THE JEWELS is an edited recording of a performance consisting almost entirely of her stories. Compared with her other shows and albums there are relatively few musical elements. Many stories can be read in her book Stories from the Nerve Bible. By telling stories wherein she herself figures, it is stressed that the speaking and singing female vocalist one sees and hears on the stage or hears on the CD is also the author, and that author is female. In general, it is normal for female singers to sing or tell the stories of others, by performing a persona created by a (mostly male) writer and composer (for example in opera or in song). This context gives the autobiographical element in Anderson’s work a special meaning: she again and again (in the performance, and not only in the credits) stresses that she is not singing others’ songs or stories, but that she herself made her songs and stories. While the lives of divas like Maria Callas sometimes seem to resemble the fantastic stories of the operas (with glamour and tragic love-affairs), Laurie Anderson turns it the other way round: she writes her stories according to her life. But of course we know her life only as it is being told by her. Laurie Anderson writes her own life. She, the teller, is in her own stories, while these stories are invented by her: a ‘closed circuit’ between singer/teller and song/story/persona.
I turned the corner in Soho today and somebody looked right at me and said, ‘Oh no! Another Laurie Anderson clone!’ (from ‘Talk Normal’ 1986; Anderson 1994: 225)
Often the stories are quite fantastic and obviously stylized. Are they true? Did the stories truly happen? Does that matter? This is, after all, art. Is this author, this Laurie Anderson as she is presented in the story and in the performance, a fiction? Is this per- former Laurie Anderson ‘herself’, or does she perform the role of Laurie Anderson? In literature, the ‘I’ in the novel is not the writer him/herself: it is a narrating persona. The
60 Warner Bros. 9 45847-2
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192 same can be said about Anderson’s performances: isn’t the ‘I’ we see and hear a persona? A persona which represents the author and which has much in common with the author, but which is first of all an artistic construction. But Anderson ‘herself’ seems to answer this question differently in the introduction to Stories from the Nerve Bible:
[O]ne question that people often ask me is, ‘Is this stuff actually true?’ The answer is yes. Except for the songs, of course. For example, I never really saw a host of angels mowing down my lawn. I don’t even have a lawn. It just seems like I do sometimes. (Anderson 1994: 7)
Even if these stories are ‘true’, they are in any case very much stylized selections of the truth; the same can be said about the introduction from which the above quote is taken. Anderson already points to this early in her career, in an interview with John Howell:
- Are there things you’ve thought of as material that you wouldn’t perform for some reason or another? ‘Yeah, but I can’t talk about them for the same reason. I’ve never said anything that I felt uncomfortable saying. [...] I always felt it was a mistake being labeled as an autobiograph- ical artist. I never felt I used that kind of material as primary stuff but that it was fitted into this structure that made it something else. [...] You cannot not project yourself in some way.’ (Howell 1979: 17)
I think it is important to realize that although the form of Anderson’s performance is autobiographical, we don’t know about the content. And what does it matter? For the listener, reader and viewer, author Laurie Anderson exists only through her music, texts and performances anyhow. In her work, Laurie Anderson is a function of the music, text and performance. Of course, for some or maybe most listeners/viewers/readers, the illusion of the real, personal Laurie Anderson is important. An example of this can be found in an interview with Anderson; it is at the same time an example of this problematic being a theme in her work and in the reception of it (here in the form of the interviewer):
- Do people still confuse ‘you’ with Laurie Anderson, the performer? ‘Not now, but it used to happen. People used to think I was their friend because they knew so much about me, or thought they did. I used to get letters that were quite personal.’ (John Howell 1979: 17)
The phenomenon of the interview itself is of course symptomatic of the desire to find the real author or person behind the author as she appears in her works. But who do we learn to know in an interview? Isn’t an interview a (different kind of) performance in itself? (And let’s not forget that an interview is a co-production in a problematic form:
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193 we never know whose words we’re reading; ultimately the interviewer writes all the words.) Isn’t the pop- or film-star also a persona outside musical works, performances or films? The author outside her work is constructed by interviews and other (visual, aural, linguistic) texts. Often, the Laurie-Anderson-in-the-performance tells (or conceals) the same as Laurie-Anderson-outside-the-performance being interviewed, as the first quote above of Howell/Anderson (1979) makes clear. In interviews, Laurie Anderson also seems to tell stories about her life, as in her performances;61 sometimes these stories are the same. This can have the effect of confusing the boundaries between art and real life: is this evidence of the autobiographical nature of her art, or does it instead show that interviews are also performances? An interviewer can be charmed by Anderson’s ‘interview-performance’, as is the case with Hester Carvalho:
Haar stem is hypnotiserend. Dankzij de nauwkeurige woordkeuze en pauzes wordt het gesprek een optreden voor één toeschouwer.62 (Carvalho 1995)
Interviewer Jenny Turner, however, was manifestly irritated by Laurie Anderson’s story- telling in the interview:
L[aurie A[nderson] is happy to tell stories about anything you like until the cows come home. Except that she tells them the way that she wants to, which doesn’t have a lot to do with telling you what you want to know. Although she swears to the veracity of every word of her stories, told in the loft or from the stage - ‘The songs aren’t, necessarily. But all my stories are completely true’ - they are true only in a particular way. [...] These anecdotes are not being remembered afresh. They are being remembered as a pre-existing memory, already organised in its little frame. Some of them I have already read in clippings from the US press. Several of them were turned into recordings or performance pieces many, many years ago. (Turner 1995: 29)63
The blurring of the boundaries between art and life in Anderson’s work shows autobiography as an artistic genre, and both the author-in-the-work and the author- outside-the-work as constructions. Often the author-constructions look very ‘natural’; its
61 I interviewed Laurie Anderson for the radio programme 220 Volt of radio De Concertzender, The Netherlands, 28 October 1995.
62 ‘Her voice hypnotizes. Thanks to the careful choice of words and pauses the conversation becomes a performance for one spectator.’ (Translation by Hannah Bosma.)
63 I thank Henriette Straub for giving me this article.
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194 artificiality can be compared with cosmetics creating a ‘natural look’. On the other hand, in her performances, film and recordings, Anderson also shows some emphatic con- structions of her appearance and voice: visual and vocal masks like the impressive strange facial masks, hiding other masks, in the BBC documentary The Human Face (1991), or, among others, the ‘Sharkey’ mask for the Mister Heartbreak tour (1984); or her voice transformed by a Vocoder into a deep male voice in many performances. ‘It’s such a relief not to be myself!’ (from an interview with John Howell 1984, in Anderson 1994: 87) Anderson compares her use of different vocal styles with her vocal ‘performance’ in real life:
- You don’t call what you do in your performances acting, and it isn’t just personality either. ‘I would call it talking styles. For instance, I’ve used about eight talking styles today, starting with a phone call about a death in the family and talking with my mother, then screaming at the lawyer in my most efficient, business-like style. A lot of audio stuff I’ve done has drawn on that – you could either use the filters you already have or, as I like to do, use electronic ones. The first songs I did like that were Songs for Telephones, half normal voice and half through a telephone filter, that voice of New York social life: “Hi, how are you, we should really get together some time.” Things people keep saying and that’s the total sum of the conversation, just social jive talking that everybody does. I do it all the time. Since I work a lot with tape, I get used to hearing myself, and when I listen to myself talking with other people during the day, I realize how many styles I actually have, and it’s a lot. So the extent to which I use any idea of acting is to use those different forms of voices.’ (Howell 1979: 16)
These masks can be seen as pointing to and playing with the constructedness and the different roles of the subject, and as making possible a playful freedom. By their emphaticalness, however, it seems to me that they also point to the difference in truthful- ness of different constructions, and so are not suggesting a postmodern pure, value-free indifference. Though no one persona is the one and only completely pure real Laurie Anderson, some of her personas seem more true or real than others.
[S]he had gone to the Museum of Natural History and written about a stuffed seal in its painted panorama of icebergs and snow floats. I think about that seal a lot at night when I’m sitting around trying to figure out what my life is slowly becoming.
Art and illusion, illusion and art This is the song that I’m singing in my heart Art and illusion, illusion and art
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195 Was it a real seal, or was it only art? Was it a former seal, or was it really art? Art and illusion, illusion and art.
(Anderson 1994: 106)
Looking back to Austin’s La Barbara and Westerkamp’s Journal, we are now warned to be careful about the (auto)biographic nature of these pieces. Authors, whether inside or outside compositions, are always constructions and roles. La Barbara already gave this warning, in replying to Austin’s question about her name with: ‘Do you want the real story?’, and going on to say that in the past she used to tell different stories about it. Does it matter whether La Barbara and Westerkamp are telling the truth in these pieces? What is important here is that in all these pieces female authors are represented.
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196 VII.3 ‘The Death of the Singer’
The power and the problematic of authorship resides in the permanency of the work, of which the written text is a prototype. Because of its permanence, a written text can be interpreted by different persons in different times and places.64 An author is fundamentally absent from his text (or film, or tape-composition). Although authors often try to exert as much power over their work as possible, and although law protects the author to a large extent, authors cannot control the interpretations, influences and traces marked by their works. (They cannot even fully control the text itself, there are always enormous influences from other persons, culture, circumstances, styles and conventions, as well as from the unconscious of the author.) The author is ‘dead’: the reader brings the text alive, there are multiple ways to interpret and there is no guarantee that the intentions of the author will be followed. The author of a text or film is essentially absent from this text or film; the composer is absent from the score. But when the notion of the artwork is extended to improvisations and other live, bodily practices, the notion of an abstract author is more problematic. In improvisation or performance, where does the musical or performative text end and the person begin? And what difference does it make when this performance is recorded? The author-performer is also ‘dead’ in a live performance in the sense that s/he does not fully control the performance and that s/he does not control the interpretations by the audience. But a difference is that live performance is momentary and is in time and place inherently connected to the author-performer. When recorded however, the performative text may become permanent, copied, out of the reach of the author, and may come in different contexts. Through recording, a vocalist can become as it were an author of a lasting, distributable product, and thus ‘die’ by her/his absence from it.65 The recording can be ‘stolen’ and re-used in a way which was not intended. (Although this may be illegal if
64 With ‘permanency’ I do not only mean ‘paper and ink’, but also the abstract permanency of a written text: it can be copied and multiplied but it is still the same text.
65 Ironically, one of the first usages of sound recording as envisioned for Thomas Edison’s phonograph, was the preservation of ‘dead’ voices, by for example recording the voices of dying people as a souvenir (Engh 1994: 124, quoting Scientific American December 22, 1877; March 26, 1887; November 19, 1887).
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197 the author, performer or producer has not given permission – ‘sampling’ has caused many law suits and disputes; see Cutler 1994.) Making a new electronic composition out of pre-existing recorded music has been called ‘plunderphonics’ by John Oswald (Cutler 1994).66 The three compositions discussed below are each based on the manipulation of one vocalist’s recording. The manipulation techniques differ for each composition: manipulation of records, tape cutting and splicing, or computer-based analysis/re-synthesis. What is the virtual relation of the ‘plundering’ composer with the ‘plundered’ vocalist? Interpretation, violation, homage, indifference, theft?
VII.3.1 Maria Callas
An example of plunderphonics is the piece Maria Callas (1988)67 by Christian Marclay. Marclay’s artistic work is for an important part concerned with the manipulation of records; whether as live, improvising turntablist, as composer of recorded pieces (such as this one), or as visual artist. For Maria Callas, records were mixed and manipulated on multiple turntables, and recorded with overdubbing.68 This piece consists of a re-composition of fragments of recorded singing from the famous singer Maria Callas. Her long high notes and non-verbal vocalisations are emphatically edited, cut, rearranged and superposed; the sound of her voice is not distorted. Except for ‘encore, encore’ (1'46-1'55), no words can be heard. Callas' vocal art forms the basis and the material for this composition. Without her recorded singing, this composition would not exist. Marclay did not secretly ‘steal’ her recorded singing, but draws attention to Maria Callas by giving her name to the title of this piece. Marclay's manipulations are heard clearly. Both ‘Callas' part’ and ‘Marclay's part’ are distinguishable in Maria Callas.
66 The first ‘plunderphonics’ piece based on one recording (Elvis Presley’s Blue Suede Shoes) is Collage Nr. 1 (“Blue Suede”) by James Tenney, 1961 (Cutler 1994).
67 On CD that comes with Musicworks 60, 1994; also on CD CHRISTIAN MARCLAY – MORE ENCORES, ReR CM1; originally 10” LP MORE ENCORES, No Man’s Land, nml 8816, 1988.
68 Sleeve notes of MORE ENCORES.
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198 Is this piece an homage to Maria Callas, or does it make her singing ridiculous? The overall impression is an excessive exaggeration of the stereotypes of operatic singing, a larger-than-life sound bath, in a negative as well as in a positive sense. Callas' art of interpreting characters, often considered as her most important contribution to the history of opera performance, is completely lost in Maria Callas. Her singing is fragmented. The excessive prolongation (continuous repetition) of the high dominant b (0'57–1'43; 2'47–2'57), with Callas' wide vibrato (often considered one of her weak points), can have a ridiculing effect. Here the stereotype of female operatic singing as high, loud and non-verbal is reinforced; however, by its excessive exaggeration, it is criticized as well as de-stereotyped: we can listen anew to this long high note and hear the details inside. On the other hand, other parts highlight her beautiful, virtuosic vocal art. Particular aspects of Callas' singing are brought to the fore: her specific sound colours are isolated, superimposed and highlighted, as are her specific changes in sound colour, her typical vibrato, transitions between notes and sudden, fast, light, titillating coloratura. This is not so much a plain sound bath as a rain or shower of diverse, detailed, subtle, small sound movements of Callas’ non-verbal singing voice. All these aspects are features of operatic singing that are not notated in a score, but created by the vocalist. The structure of Maria Callas is based on the isolation and rearrangement of these features. Maria Callas is neither an interpretation- appropriation of a musical composition, nor of a libretto (both the work of traditional authors); instead, it focuses on the vocal art of a singer. With Maria Callas, Marclay highlights singer Maria Callas as a vocal creator, or one might even say: vocal ‘author’.
VII.3.2 Een Lied van Schijn en Weezen
Een Lied van Schijn en Weezen (1992/93)69 by Gilius van Bergeijk is another electroacoustic composition in which a recording of female singing is re-used. The main part of this composition is made by subjecting a recording of the fourth
69 On CD GILIUS VAN BERGEIJK - VOLUME ONE, X-OR CD 07.
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199 movement of Gustav Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, performed by singer Kathleen Ferrier and conductor Bruno Walter (1949), to a procedure of shifting repetition. The composer made the piece by cutting and splicing audio tape by hand.70 First the first four seconds; then 1’-5’ , then 2’-6’, etc. Gradually the intervals become smaller: in the end one no longer hears repetition, but distortion. At first this procedure turns Ferrier's singing into stuttering; later one recognizes the procedure. The effect is an impression of great violence exerted on Ferrier's singing: regardless of music and phrasing, her voice is cut again and again in the middle of a note, phrase or breath. In the end, her voice is wildly distorted. In the sleeve notes Richard Ayres states that the theme of Een Lied van Schijn en Weezen is the passage between illusion and reality. (The Dutch title translates as: A Song of Appearance and Being). He relates this to the text of Mahler's song:
The beautiful text depicts a parent's two attempts at coming to terms psychologically with the death of children. During the first two verses a mother (in this recording) tries to convince herself that her children have merely gone out walking in the mountains, and that they will soon return safely home. In the final verse she finally admits that they won't be returning and have instead 'gone ahead' - a recognition that they are in fact dead, and that at some point everybody must follow. [...] The master tape consists of thousands of tiny tape slivers, all cut and glued together by hand, and all playing a unique part in the metamorphosis between what it appears to be – Mahler – and what it is in reality – Gilius van Bergeijk.
One may relate this theme to the ‘Death of the Author’. While for the reader or the listener the author is absent and ‘dead’, for the author, writer or composer it is the other way around: his ‘children’ (his texts or compositions) will go away, will be cut off and, as it were, ‘die’. In Een Lied van Schijn en Weezen, the recording of Ferrier's and Walter's performance of Mahler's composition appears to be ‘dead’ or to have departed from its originators: re-used and changed by Gilius van Bergeijk. In the sleeve notes, Een Lied van Schijn en Weezen is related to the text of Mahler's composition, but nothing is said about the performance by Kathleen Ferrier and Bruno Walter. The orchestra is not even mentioned. This is remarkable because Een Lied van Schijn en Weezen is completely made from the recording of their performance. Ferrier's voice especially is very characteristic for this piece. The recording is not a neutral reproduction of Mahler's score, but has a particular
70 Sleeve notes of the CD.
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200 character. Van Bergeijk's compositional process does not manipulate Mahler's score, but the recording of Ferrier's and Walter's performance. The compositional process is however inspired by the text of Mahler's composition. The sleeve notes, the title and the compositional process of Van Bergeijk's composition relate to the text of Mahler's composition, not to Ferrier's vocal creation. Ferrier is described as a figure in the composition (‘a mother’), not as a vocal authority. Van Bergeijk's compositional method seems not to have any relation with Ferrier's particular way of singing. This forms a sharp contrast with Marclay's composition Maria Callas, in which Callas' vocal authority is central with regard to the title, the sound and the structure of the composition.
VII.3.3 Dodge – Caruso: Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental
Another example of (high-tech) plunderphonics is Any Resemblance Is Purely Coincidental (1980) by Charles Dodge,71 with computer analysis and re-synthesis of a 1907 recording of the voice of Enrico Caruso singing ‘Vesti la giubba’ from Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci. The sleeve notes explain the title: it is a response to RCA’s stipulation that neither the name Enrico Caruso nor his visual likeness be used.72
The title of the work recalls the standard disclaimer from FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] television dramas of the 1950's. I chose it when assured by RCA Records that I could use the computer renderings of the legendary voice if I made no attempt to exploit Caruso's name or visual likeness.73
In a live performance of Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental, the piano part is performed live on stage, accompanied by the tape consisting of manipulated singing of Caruso and electronic sounds. Caruso’s voice is thereby isolated from its original orchestral setting (except small parts in the beginning and at the end). Divided into parts, almost the whole original aria is heard in unaltered form (without orchestral
71 CHARLES DODGE – ANY RESEMBLANCE IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL, New Albion Records, NA043, 1992.
72 Apparently, record company RCA owned the copyright of this recording.
73 Dodge in the sleeve notes of the CD.
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201 accompaniment) in this piece, in the original order (beginning–0’38’; 1’47–1’52; 2’29– 2’34; 2’47–3’08; 5’13–5’21; 5’55–7’08). Parts of Caruso's singing are also heard in manipulated form: rhythm, pitch and/or timbre of the vocal sounds are changed, often into unreal-sounding vocal phrases. The manipulation of the musical laughing of the original aria into different pitches and speeds is striking (1’54–2’27; 5’44–5’55). Here especially, and at other moments when the pitch is manipulated (the ‘Recitare’ motive at 0’43–1’42; 4’14–5’08), Caruso becomes a kind of puppet manipulated by the composer:
In Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental an operatic voice searches for an accompa- niment: with the original orchestra, with copies of itself, with the piano, and with other computer sounds. The initial attempts are humorous; subsequently, other emotions are evoked until the loneliness of the ‘great performer’ emerges.74
Later (at 3’08–4’10; 5’24–5’34’; 7’08–end) Caruso's voice dissolves into high, reverberated, prolonged, amplified overtones. It sounds as if the sorrowful singing is accompanied by a sad counterpart, and after the dramatic impact of the end of the unaltered aria (5’55–7’08) Caruso's voice seems to drown into an accumulation of sharp, ringing, ‘metallic’ reverberating tones, suggesting distance, anguish, panic and loneliness. On the one hand, Caruso’s singing seems sometimes to be ridiculed or destroyed (dissolved, distorted, drowned); on the other hand, it often keeps its original power (especially at 5’55-7’08, the climax of the original aria). The manipulation of the singing reinforces the dramatic meaning of the aria: the laughing is made more funny by pitch transposition and repetition; when the pagliaccio sings about tears, sobbing, pain and sorrow, the singing is transformed into sad and panicky sounding electronics. In Any Resemblance, it is not so much the sound of Caruso’s voice that is important, but the dramatic expression as it is heard in Caruso’s original performance as well as in Dodge’s remake: phrases and parts of phrases, not isolated vocal sounds, are used as musical material. In Dodge’s composition, a virtual performer, a new persona, is made out of Caruso’s recorded singing. Dodge ascribes ‘loneliness’ to this ‘great performer’. Thereby the original persona of the pagliaccio (Canio, a clown) remains important in Dodge’s composition. Canio is a clown and therefore a peformer, like Caruso. Moreover, in the opera Canio is manipulated by Tonio, resulting in the murder of
74 Dodge in the sleeve notes of the CD.
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202 Canio’s wife and her lover by Canio. Canio sings the aria ‘Vesti la giubba’ at the moment that he must put on his clown costume for the show, when he has just discovered the infidelity of his wife: the show must go on. Caruso and the character he impersonates (the pagliaccio) conflate: both are puppets. Dodge’s manipulations can be clearly distinguished from Caruso’s original. However, the powerful impression this composition makes depends for a large part on Caruso’s singing. In the main ‘Dodge’ seems to be the master who did the editing and re-composition. He couldn’t have done this, however, without Caruso’s original; in this sense ‘Dodge’ is dependent on the recorded Caruso. Dodge is not only manipulating Caruso’s voice; he also gives him room. Then, ‘Caruso’ takes over with the impact of his singing. It is significant that Caruso’s original performance of the aria (extracted from the orchestral accompaniment) is inserted in its entirety in Dodge’s composition; in this way, the original is respected. In the narrative of the composition however, great performer Caruso changes into a lonely, pitiful persona. Any Resemblance seems someti- mes a ‘murdering’ of, sometimes a ‘theft’ from, sometimes a homage to singer Caruso. The issue of authorship is evoked by Dodge himself in the sleeve notes: ‘The composer has said that he always wanted to have a great performer play his music, and he finally had one who was in no position to refuse.’ Clearly, the rivalry between composers and performers as discussed by Abbate is at stake here, self-reflectively evoked by the composer. Through recording, the singing subject can be made into an object and incorporated. The recorded singing subject can be acknowledged as a creative authority, but can also be ‘killed’ because of his/her absence from the recorded musical- vocal text. Comparing Any Resemblance with Maria Callas, it is striking that in the re-use of the female singing, the sound of the voice and its microstructure are stressed; drama, narrative, story, character and interpretation are lost. But in the case of the importation of the male singing voice, character, drama, macrostructure and interpretation are of central importance; ‘pure’ sound is made out of the male voice by electronic transformation. This distinction between re-using female vocal sound versus male vocal character is reminiscent of the distinction found by Barbara Bradby (1993) in her study of popular dance music between ‘sampling women’s bodies’ (female voices and images) and ‘sampling men’s ideas’ (male compositional fragments).
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203 VII.4 Conclusion
Sound recording makes it possible to consider a vocalist as an author of a durable, reproducible, disseminable sound-text. But, like the author of a literary text or a score, the vocalist-author has no absolute power over her/his products: the recordings can be interpreted, re-interpreted, re-used and re-worked by others; some examples have been discussed. Becoming an author, i.e. producing ‘text’75 from which one is (literally or metaphorically) absent, means taking the risk of ‘life’ and ‘death’ at the same time: the work goes into the world, will be multiplied, and will be interpreted and incorporated by others.76 Because, stereotypically, composers are mostly male and vocalists mostly female, this change of status of the vocalist into an author, producing instead of reproducing, can be considered as affecting musical gender roles. This does not mean, however, that these changes take place automatically as a determinate result of technological changes. Different tendencies can be perceived and theorized. Although electronic sound recording and processing technology offers possibilities to change the authorial status of vocalists by 1) changing the status of their creation from evanescent performance to reproducible, durable, distributable work and 2) using specific vocal sounds as a basic and inextricable part of a composition; nonetheless female voices in electronic music are often incorporated as vocal objects. Whereas in performed music the singer is impressively present, in tape music the name of the vocalist is sometimes not even mentioned. But there are also compositions in which different forms of vocal, compositional and textual authorship are explored and the stereotypical, hierarchical dichotomy of male composer and female vocal performer is abandoned. That recording technology does not necessarily lead to either the emancipation or the disappearance of the singer can be seen in the comparison of the
75 With ‘text’ I refer to all kinds of literary, musical, vocal, cinematic, visual etc. texts.
76 This is a risk, however, that not all authors accept. The stereotypical Masculine God-Author, whose ‘death’ was declared by Barthes, typically tries to master his (literary or musical) texts as much as possible. An example is Michael Jackson (or his representatives) who pursued to destruction John Oswald’s CD PLUNDERPHONICS, on which fragments of Jackson’s music (among others) were transformed and re- composed. PLUNDERPHONICS was financed entirely by Oswald himself and given away free to radio stati- ons and the press. (Cutler 1994: 7)
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204 work of singer-composers (like Joan La Barbara) with Berio’s rendering of Thema: Omaggio a Joyce, or by comparing Maria Callas with Een Lied van Schijn en Wezen.
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205